Most of the major candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are copying Bernie Sanders’ three-pronged platform of a $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-all and free college tuition. How do you differentiate if everyone promises the same thing?
So Many Democratic Candidates, So Many Identical Platform Planks
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From what I understand, Ted, there’s one candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for US president in 2020 who does seem to promise something over and above the promises you mention above, viz, Tusi Gabbard, who has expressed a certain amount of skepticism with respect to your country’s interminable wars of foreign aggression….
Of course, she hasn’t a chance….
Henri
She’s great. But the Powers That Be have ruled her out, as you say.
In general, any promise from a Dem candidate must be taken as worth considerably less than its weight in pigshit*** … wait, pigshit is too valuable … how about angry, hungry mosquitoes?
In particular, any Dem presidential candidate not rabidly co-campaigning for Dem control of congress is merely confirming her/his address in fantasy land^^^ … and confirming that any (useful) promises are blatant lies.
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*** see “Obumma legacy™”
^^^ thus allowing any promise to be made, resting assured Mitch the turtle will happily prevent anything so untoward as even a minor break for the 99+% from ever becoming law. (See also; Garland Merrick or Merrick Garland, whoever the hell.)
“thus allowing any promise to be made, resting assured Mitch the turtle will happily prevent anything so untoward as even a minor break for the 99+% from ever becoming law.”
See “Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America” by Walter Karp for an elaboration on your above theme.
Thanks, Glenn.
I just read that about a month or so ago. It was the first Walter Karp book I had read, having previously only read some of his very fine essays. The book was actually about something somewhat different than what I had thought it was, and I must say … as cynical as I already was, even I was shocked when he laid his premise out in black and white early in the book. But I was pretty well convinced by the end. I guess I had already kind of thought it was the case, just hadn’t had it articulated in quite that way.
It cries out for a flowchart, doesn’t it?
Did the candidate push for M4A, $15/hr., free tuition before Bernie Sanders forced those issues onto the stage?
Did the candidates mock Sanders’ ideas as pie-in-the-sky and nonsense?
Did the candidate have no trouble, no trouble ‘t all, funding wars and tax cuts for megacorporations?
Does the candidate flip-flop on a regular basis? (Granted, Hillary Rodham Kissinger is the gold standard for flip-flopping, so put each candidate’s rate of flip-floppery on that scale.)
I think these candidates are a bad bunch of bullshit artists. Except for Bernie Sanders. I think Tulsi has promise as either a cabinet member or a veep, but I think Nina Turner is both qualified and necessary. The MSM keeps ignoring all the “BernieBros” who are not men. They keep ignoring the non-white Bernie supporters, they ignore the younger Bernie supporters, they lie, early and often, and they will not stop. To push back against this, Sanders should pick Turner.
I’d also love to see how Hillary Kissinger reacts at the swearing in ceremony in 2021. Barring any unforeseen incident, Ms. Kissinger should live long enough to see the better country she kept from coming because of her naked, unearned, unremitting greed and personal neediness.
True. The 2016 primary created clarity – as did the Iraq war and the bank bailout before.
Tulsi Gabbard threw her support behind Bernie early on, as did Nina Turner. In doing so they knowingly incurred a likely cost to their careers in order to be part of building momentum at a time when it was hardly guaranteed to pay off.
Much in the way Elisabeth Warren did not – to be fair she at least stayed neutral insofar such a thing is possible nowadays.
After repeatedly ducking what official investigations will identify as a single persistent magic bullet fired by one of his own supporters in celebration, pres elect Sanders disentangles himself from the heap of government agents in immaculate black suits to make a series of phone calls. The first one is to Warren – “pick any government post”, essentially. The fifth or so is to Gabbard to ask her to serve as SecDef with a mandate to refocus on actual defense and begin reversing the militarization of the U.S. on all levels of society.
Hey, one can dream ;-?
I mean, those are the somewhat realistic choices, e.g. nominating Snowden as director of an alphabet soup agency would cost a lot more political capital 😉
I would take a hard pass on Warren. I don’t remember who said it first but the hottest corner in hell is reserved for those who did nothing.
Look at all of Ted’s, uh, colleagues who have sat on their asses and done neither a jot nor a tittle while the LAPD’s little gang of whores did their very best to ruin him.
There’s a scene in The Boondocks TV series where Huey is shouting at the police (who have drawn their guns on an unarmed black man) that the man in question doesn’t have a gun. And the cops can’t seem to process the info. So they keep screaming “Drop the gun,” while Huey keeps responding that the man doesn’t have a gun.
Anyone who listened to the recording (and I assume Ted’s version is equivalent to the version the LATimes got because the LATimes never produced a better quality tape) can reach only one conclusion: you can’t tell ANYTHING from it, and the cleaned-up version Ted had to pay for contains some brief snippet of voice that seems to back Ted’s version. Regardless, as evidence, it’s not enough to hang a hat on. It’s a six-minute static-filled version of a TV yule log. But God A’mighty and the Heavenly Host, everyone acted like it was incontrovertible proof. There’s no smoking gun, but everyone is acting like Ted’s fingerprints are all over the weapon, which doesn’t exist.
And just about every goddamned person whose voice would have mattered out there who could have piped up and said something in support of Ted Rall did a Warren. Stayed nice and fucking neutral and quietly kept taking the gold. No questions asked. I’m surprised they didn’t sing louder and louder as Ted became more frantic.
I’ve just about had enough of quiet neutral people; I’d like to see the hellraisers in charge for a while.
(I’ve been reading my copy of “An Edge in My Voice” and my blood pressure is up around 240. Ted, I hope you’ve had a chance to dip into the copy I sent you. I bet Harlan Ellison would have been raising hell out in front of the LATimes over this.)
There’s an ancient Chinese saying, which goes back at least to the Yuan dynasty, to the effect that 路遥知马力，日久见人心, i e, a long road tests a horse’s strength, time tests a man’s heart. Of those candidates mouthing siimilar slogans in Ted’s cartoon above, only one has stood the test of time – Bernard Sanders. No wonder the Washington Post is dedicating such great effort to bad mouthing him ; if elected – and not assassinated before taking office – the risk is great that he would actually attempt to carry out those campaign promises….
Henri
I toldja last time around that Bernie’s near miss would shift the conversation to the left. It feels so good to be right (I can only assume being wrong feels bad. 😉
Beats the heck out of choosing between Biden & Hillary. So, yeah, the candidates will have to differentiate themselves from each other … hopefully by moving even further left.
“It feels so good to be right (I can only assume being wrong feels bad.”
I once made a mistake.
My mistake was that I thought I was wrong, but it turned out that I wasn’t.
To Hurricane Crazy,
Re: shifting conversations
Sanders’ experience was hardly a “near miss” but, rather, the result of serious crimes. Said crimes, in favor of HRC, led directly to His Hairness managing to get elected. (In an eerily similar way that WJC’s impeachment and trial did for Bush “the profoundly impaired.”)
I’d suggest that the DNC committed the domestic version of the democracy-destroying international crimes you so vividly decry against Russia.
Mueller’e report will be released tomorrow, apparently, and will present the case that Russians/RTP© obtained the incontrovertible evidence (and got it revealed to US citizens) that the DNC committed serial counts of election fraud in its own 2016 primaries. (Note: To avoid one of your turbo-parsing episodes >>> I DO NOT agree that there was a Russki hack of DNC servers.)
As a result, the chances of WWIII starting in earnest are far greater than the chances that “the conversation” will be shifting to: “who in the DNC should be prosecuted.”
WHOEVER lifted the DNC emails should be thanked for revealing election fraud by a major US political party, just like Manning/Assange (2010) should be thanked for giving US citizens the proof that war crimes are routinely being committed in their names … to the tune of 50% of their tax dollars.
Maybe Putin will approve of the 2020 Dem candidate and have his GRU folks gather the proof of RNC election fraud this time? (Note, above, re turbo-parsing, STILL applies.)
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“The conversation” within the Dem party may appear to have “moved to the left,” however:
1) “to the left” of the Dems is still well to the right of center.
2) there is a long way to go in the campaign and the only reasonable expectation AT THIS MOMENT is that the DNC will effectively (and criminally, if necessary) “adjust” the conversation back to the right.
2,a) there is a great number of Dem hopefuls, not pictured in the comic, who are NOT shifting leftward their “conversations” and their conversations begin well into “the right.”
3) in the meantime, the national “conversation” has sprinted to the right for 2.25 years, making the (pictured) early Dems’ “shifted conversation” essentially meaningless. For example, none of the repeated proposals of said candidates can possibly be afforded without reasonable (i.e. healthily increased), enforced levels of corporate taxation. I don’t see the shift in THAT conversation coming anytime soon.
> Sanders’ experience was hardly a “near miss”
Really? Was Sanders elected and I missed it? ‘cuz the way I remember was that he was gaining momentum all along, just peaked too late to take the nom. He still took a hell of a lot of delegates, in spite of the DNC’s efforts. Call it what you will, I call it a ‘near miss.’
> I DO NOT agree that there was a Russki hack of DNC servers.
Still in denial? Still believe that the FBI and DNC and RNC and Facebook and DJTJR are all in a humoungous conspiracy bigger than the moon landing and Kennedy assassination multiplied together? SERIOUSLY??! Dude, you really need to put down the crack pipe and join the rest of us here on planet Earth. Otherwise, you probably will believe that the redacted Mueller report fulfills your every paranoid fantasy. (The rest of us might not agree with your interpretation.)
> As a result, the chances of WWIII starting in earnest are far greater than the chances that “the conversation” will be shifting to: “who in the DNC should be prosecuted.”
I can agree with that, not sure what it’s got to do with my post, but I sincerely doubt anyone in the DNC is going to jail. (Even though making false reports to the DOJ is a criminal offense, they’ll go free since everyone knows the DOJ is composed entirely of Hillbots.)
> the national “conversation” has sprinted to the right for 2.25 years,
Yep.
> making the (pictured) early Dems’ “shifted conversation” essentially meaningless.
Nope. It’s different than it was three years ago. But, y’know, if you think they’re all the same you can always write in Hillary. Some of the rest of us are supporting Sanders.
All of this talk of a Democratic Party presidential nomination leaves me nonplussed, given that the Democratic Party primary elections are, by the party’s own admission, merely non-binding referenda.
The defense of the party for the use of their admitted right to ignore election results of presidential primaries was presented by the Democratic Party in the class-action lawsuit filed by Bernie Sanders voters and donors against the DNC.
https://medium.com/theyoungturks/dnc-we-can-legally-choose-candidate-over-cigars-in-back-room-e3026730e252
So what is the real meaning and consequence of voting for Democratic Party primary candidates for president?
Why participate in sham elections, and to what end?
Candidates must have the backing of the super-delegates and the DNC to get the nomination. They don’t need to say anything different in public. They are just trying to show the DNC that they can get the media coverage, and a positive response from the public. The candidate that gets the super-delegates will get the nomination.